Cyberpunk 2077 sticks to the original streets

Cyberpunk 2077 is an attempt to create an adventure game that pulls the player into the world of the Cyberpunk game-world, which began as a table-top role-playing game written by Mike Pondsmith.

When Projekt RED said that they are working with the original Cyberpunk creator on the game, I pictured an aging games creator dismissively giving permission for the studio to work in his work, or maybe ask him some questions about it, but it seems that Pondsmith is more involved than I thought.

In this video Pondsmith talks a little about what he was thinking when he created Cyberpunk, how he got involved in Cyberpunk 2077, and how the new video game ties into previous looks at the world.

As the creator mentions, Cyberpunk is not just about future tech, and it’s not really meant to be dystopic, it’s just a look at how humans may be changed by technology at a very ‘street’ level. The interesting thing about 2077 is the aspects of that world that it chooses to look at most closely. The game is focusing on the ‘pychos’, people in the world who have modified too much of their bodies with cybernetics, and thus gone more than a bit crazy, lashing out at the organic people around them in, often, sudden spectacles of violence.

In the table-top game, the existence of pychos serves two purposes. They create for the players a justifiably slaughterable type of human enemy, and they serve as a reason for limiting the player’s ability to become overpowered through the use of too many cybernetic modifications.

In 2077, however, they have a new purpose. Some of them have been rehabilitated into a special police organization tasked with the specific role of hunting down other psychos and stopping them. The teaser trailer we saw last week is a depiction of one such take-down, and apparent subsequent recruitment.

The game’s official synopsis is thus:

In Cyberpunk 2077, the player will be thrown into a dark future. The metropolis of Night City is a stage set to tell the tale of one individual, raised on the streets, who tries to lift himself up from the gutter and find a way to survive amongst boostergangs and megacorporations in a city of filth and sin. Drugs, violence, poverty and exclusion haven't disappeared by 2077, as people stayed they were for centuries—greedy, closed-minded and weak. But not only ghosts of the past trouble mankind, but new issues have appeared. Psychos go on rampages and the streets are filled with junkies addicted to a new form of entertainment—the braindance, a cheap way to experience the emotions and stimuli of someone else, someone living a more exciting life.

Cyberpunk 2077 is tentatively slated for 2015, but the studio says that the real release date is "when it’s done." Projekt RED also says that they will have more to reveal on February 5, 2013, including an announcement of yet another open-world action-RPG game currently in development.